General Best Practices for Themes

The following list provides some general knowledge and best practices to remember when customizing themes for Commerce websites:

Use themes to customize HTML templates and Sass for your site.
If you are using a published theme as a baseline, the developer tools force you to create a new theme. This new theme includes your changes as a custom theme.
Use the existing folder structure as created when you downloaded themes and extensions to your Workspace directory. If you must add new subdirectories, make sure the paths to any new files are included in the theme manifest and all required entry points.
Use a development domain to test your changes before applying the updates to your production domain.
Do not move, delete, or edit files located in your Workspace/Extras directory. The files stored here are for reference and overrides only.
When you fetch a theme, you also get the HTML and Sass files for any active extensions. You can customize these files to suit your theme using the Override method. See Override Active Extension Files for details.
Place any new assets (images or fonts) in the appropriate location within the theme’s assets directory.
Use helpers when referencing any assets within your HTML or Sass customizations and overrides. See Managing Theme Assets for details.
Follow the template context when editing HTML template files or creating overrides. See HTML Best Practices for Themes for details.
To avoid file name collisions, do not create any new files or folders that share the same name, even if they reside in different locations. The exception to this practice is when working with extension overrides.
Limit the number of files and folders at the same level to 100 when developing themes and extensions. Some options include introducing images across multiple folders and placing custom modules in a different top-level directory. For more information on file and folder limiting, see SOAP Web Services Governance Overview.

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